


Ill Wind

by Morbane



Category: Temper - Nicky Drayden
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Gen, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:29:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22066306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: Sesay learns to lie.
Relationships: Sesay & Daki (Temper)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 3
Collections: New Year's Resolutions 2020





	Ill Wind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ambyr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambyr/gifts).



> Thank you for your earlier comments, ambyr! And thank you very much to ictus for checking this over before I posted it.

In Lesser Poloko, there was a story sometimes told to children, one that children told to each other. It went: if a cold wind came down from the mountain, or blew in across the sea, and caught you in an act full of vice - boasting, throwing a tantrum, taking more than your share - then the huff of Icy Blue's breath would fix that vice in you forever, and Discernment would confirm it.

The story came to Sesay tangled up in another, like seaweed enmeshed in a broken net. The virtue of sincerity, or so she thought, meant never being able to lie again.

Meant parroting back to the world what the world told her: that she wasn't a girl.

So Sesay lied. The year she was six she lied more often than she told the truth. She told outrageous lies, to make Daki and their friends laugh and to catch Icy Blue's attention. She told subtle lies, to avoid being scolded and because she reasoned that it might not count as duplicity if everyone knew the lie she told wasn't true.

She told more lies than truths that year even though their mother sat Daki and Sesay down at last and gave them a long talk about vices and virtues to set them straight. She laid out a scholar's arguments for how even she, with her virtue of grace, could speak with a hot temper; and with her vice of envy, could act from conscience. She was persuasive and reassuring and firm.

But by then, Sesay was fascinated by lies for their own sake, just as she'd told them for their own sake and not for what they could gain her. Ahead of her years, she was grasping her way towards ideas about one person's truth being another's falsehood, about duplicity hidden in the core of sincerity, like rot in fruit, and sincerity lodged in the core of duplicity for flashing teeth to crack on, like a good fruit's pit. She'd begun to recognise other liars and tellers of sideways truths and wonder at their reasons and their means.

Daki and Sesay went through Discernment at the traditional age of seven. Daki got duplicity, and Sesay called upon her newly-confirmed grace to refrain from acting as though that duplicity had been stolen from her. 

Sesay received the scar for doubt, and never swallowed a story whole again.

* * *

In the children's classes at the Lesser Poloko sanctuary, Sesay's dexterity at defting sticks outstripped the rest, but not because of natural talent. She learned on her own and she also learned from the defting practitioners who countered wu mystics on street corners, offering to tell passers-by's blessings and warn them of the traps sin had laid for them. 

At the sanctuary, Sesay learned how to build the basic suites, and on the streets, she learned how to shuffle her sticks script-down as if artlessly, build as if artlessly, so that her constructions could show exactly the messages she'd planned them to and could impress onlookers with the coincidence. This was a safe way to study lies, because there was no consequence if she told untrue. And it was a new angle to her study: coming to understand what lies people wanted to hear. 

The higher the structure, the closer to Grace; it was accepted wisdom that a low build was fraught with human error. Sesay's purpose was usually secular, but she never forgot that defting sticks were a spiritual tool, and she avoided the blasphemy of putting words in Grace's mouth. When constructing a pre-conceived message, she never built above the third suite.

* * *

Because Sesay collected and studied lies, the consequence followed that she acquired truths.

Some truths were treasures, and she shared them with Daki. Some were dangerous and uncomfortable. And when people knew that you knew their truths, they expected you to pay for them - or demand payment for silence. They didn't expect you simply to hold them and turn them over in your mind.

Sesay acquired the seed of the fund that would pay for Gabadamosi because profiting from secrets fit with other people's truths of the world.

Only Daki knew about the hoard she built this way. So, even more than money, Sesay needed an explanation for her acquisitions. A year of work in the slaughterhouse made the ends of her stories meet, and only Daki knew that some of the things Sesay bought with her earnings were not necessities.

By the time they got to Gabadamosi, they'd left behind everyone who truly understood how much money it took for a set of twins from Lesser Poloko to enter the Cape's most exclusive school, and Sesay could flash a set of defting sticks as fine as anyone's there and tell the truth about how she'd come by them.

* * *

There had never been a question that Sesay would go to Gabadamosi and Daki would stay behind.

It wasn't about proximity. Daki and Sesay had one of the greatest comfortable ranges they'd heard of. It went with the low occurrence of chimeral swapping that almost imperceptibly androgenised Daki and left no visible stripes on Sesay's skin. Sesay could have gone to school up the mountain and Daki could have stayed in the comfy, following the divergent path that most greater and lesser twins followed, only precociously.

By adolescence, most twins had tested proximity a dozen times, gritted through the headaches and the nausea, come together again in reassurance and relief. Daki and Sesay hadn't. It was Daki who gave voice to the fear of how it would feel at last to pull at the edge of their bond, but the fear ran through Sesay too.

In Lesser Poloko, no one called Daki a finemister or Sesay a laddie, but Sesay wore her truth like clothing, and her origins showed around the edges like her skin. Outside the comfy, away from her roots, it would be easier to be a girl. In Lesser Poloko, if Sesay was gone, Daki could choose to be eirself too.

But Sesay's sideways savings spoke to dozens of siblings outside the comfy who had tried and failed to leave their most vulnerable secrets behind. And she couldn't leave Daki behind in Lesser Poloko's schools while her own mind leapt ahead.

She _could_ demand that Daki play along in return for the admission to Gabadamosi that Sesay had earned for them.

It cost her nothing to admit that the balance left owing was hers.


End file.
